There are a variety of applications in which it may be desirable to determine the location of regions of interest on an object. For example, in an optical character recognition (OCR) application, a region of interest may be a text region on a document. Thus, in the OCR application, it may be desirable to distinguish these regions of interest from non-text regions such as pictures, illustrations, etc. This allows the OCR application to focus only on the regions of interest, i.e., the text regions.
Another application in which it may be desirable to determine the location of regions of interest on an object relates to processing parcels of mail. In this application, regions of interest on the parcel include the destination address, return address, and indicia (postage mark, stamp, etc.). Once determined, the regions of interest can be further analyzed to perform functions such as checking postage and sorting/routing the parcels.